“Everything that has a story, has a lesson”(Bezio). I find this statement to be really interesting as it puts value on everything we communicate. While words are weird symbols on pages and seem as though they don’t have true meaning, they are prime attributes to our lives as humans. Along with words, there are symbols. Symbols are things that stand for something else. Symbols make things so much more complicated within our lives and the stories that we create. As humans, we are faced with words, signs, and symbols. The process of figuring out how to interpret all of these different categories is the process of close reading. 

Within the process of close reading, it is vital to look at what is being read or shown, the how, why it is being shown that way, is there a context that’s important, and why is this important to me? This last step is important because in some ways many ideas connect to real life. Many aspects of pop culture represent bigger ideas or fight for bigger pictures within our society. This can be seen within music, television shows, movies, and more. I’m doing my end of the year essay on The Handmaids Tale and this is a prime example of symbolism and ideas having a larger impact on society. This series represents a deeper image of sexual assault, motherhood, and leadership. All of these ideas apply to our modern-day system and therefore, many people can learn from the show.

The Yellow Wallpaper is an additional example of using words or symbolism to represent a larger image. Within this piece of writing, the theme of feminism surrounds the audience. It is a deep piece of literature that goes deep into the roles of a woman and represents their inner struggles. While this piece of writing was published a long time ago, it is still prevalent today. It shows that pieces of writing or culture can resonate with us forever.

Since I’ve had Dr. Bezio before, I am familiar with the steps involved in close reading. In applying these steps to works of pop culture, it is quite fascinating to see how many messages are being conveyed to us, members of the intended audience. What’s more, our brains automatically process the information and arguments works of pop culture contain. So, I can see why parental figures, educators, and even our peers caution us to not accept things at face value because if we do, we risk accepting things that might actually be contrary to what we believe in. From our discussion on systems and how one might deconstruct them, I feel that the steps of close reading can help society determine the best way to eliminate harmful systems and replace them with systems that do more harm than good.

One thing that I found intriguing from the podcast was the discussion of women in the 19th century. The occupations these women could earn were mainly in the domestic sphere of life, such as working at a textile factory and making sure that the household’s needs were taken care of. Of course, this was the opposite of men’s jobs that dealt more with manual labor and, given their status as men, allowed them to be the “breadwinners” of their family. As a result, I feel that this “starting point” for women has impacted why, in the 21st century, women typically choose lower-wage and/or domestic jobs than higher-wage jobs. Besides the argument that lower-wage jobs generally provide women with more flexibility to perform their household duties than higher-wage occupations, I wonder that if women in the 18th century had more opportunities to be the “breadwinners” of their families, would modern-day society still grapple with the gender pay gap or the reality that most women do not enter fields they are qualified for because of their sex and status in society in relation to males?

Everything that has a story has a lesson (Bezio). I think this is a super important point to remember when reading anything, whether it be news or an actual story. Recognizing that everything has a lesson to learn so that the reader dives in and really reads and understands the words and context is essential for any reader. Whether it is a good lesson or a bad one, finding it and utilizing it in the real world can be really useful when examining and analyzing literature.

Also, that whole story replay confused me. I thought it was a possessive husband like locking up his wife in the castle because she was “sick” and needed rest. But by the end, I am thinking this woman who wrote this is the perspective of the woman in the walls and she is a crazy psycho or she is dead and this dude can’t let go of her. The whole wallpaper thing is creepy. The fact that the author is writing about a woman stuck in the wallpaper and how she believes that the woman gets out during the day is weird. But I looked up the story and “yellow wallpaper symbolizes societal oppression of women in American society” (Google), so the story is basically about the oppression of women and how women can be belittled into almost children just following orders by dominating family members, especially husbands.

I found today’s reading and podcast both very interesting. The idea of close reading is something that I have learned over and over again, both in high school and in college, but Dr.Bezios podcast really laid out all the different steps and questions you have to think about while close reading to really understand what the text is saying. Discussing the use of symbols in these close readings was also interesting to me. When I am personally any sort of article or book or literature, I never think about the words being symbols themselves; I think of the context of the words being a symbol to mean something else, such as the lion meaning courage example. This is why when Dr.Bezio described that even the word “cat”, the combination of the letters c-a-t is just a signifier for a creature, the animal of a cat, and how this can be a sign/symbol was a really interesting concept to me, and makes me think about different readings I have done over the years and makes me realize how much more complex words truly are. Even Dr.Bezios analysis of the word “sword” meaning violence, kingship, masculinity, etc, and then switching just one letter makes a whole new sign, a whole new symbol and a way to understand the context of the word. This paragraph became kind of a rant, but I found this idea of the complexity of words when close reading to be really interesting and something that I have not close read too deeply on. 

Now thinking about the second part of the podcast and the reading, I’ve read this story before for a class I believe in high school or early in college (I can’t remember when I read it but I remember seeing it), but I never learned about the background to the story. It was really interesting to understand that the story was a response to the author’s own rest cure treatment and seemingly going a bit crazy from it. This is really evident from the story that she goes through spurts of depression and her mental health getting worse and worse as time and the story goes on, seeming almost to the point of delusion and her mind being so warped and distorted. I think the wallpaper not only represents her feeling of being trapped, but her lack of a way to escape both her own mental illness and the opinions and views of her husband/doctor who are not caring for her  enough. There is a lot of talk about not only the color of the wallpaper, but the smell that goes with it, and that even when she goes “for a ride”, she feels like she can still smell that room, now associating the color yellow with that particular smell, almost as if its stained in her mind (that experienced is stained in her mind) and she cannot escape it. The context and background around the time period of this story makes its so much more real; a time that women were told they have “female hysteria”, and people not believing their mental health issues, making the symbolism of the room she is trapped in and the wallpaper surrounding her that much more significant and impactful to the reader, making it evident how important close reading of this story is in order to fully understand the impact of it to both the author and others during this time period.

I really enjoyed today’s podcast regarding the Yellow Wallpaper because I did read it last semester yet this time there was more information on the author and what she stood for/ how she came to write the story. For example, I thought it was absolutely crazy how they put her on bed rest and then said that she could not read, write, or even feed herself. Reading her background story reminded me of the book/ tv series The Handmaid’s Tale that I recently read for my English class. The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian future where substantial amounts of women become infertile, so they have to designate “handmaids” to go to households and carry the husband and wife’s baby for them. These women have to wear big red cloaks all the time and bonnets where their faces are always hidden. They are supposed to be protected by the evil eyes of men and are seen as objects of great fertility and virtue. In training, they look down on women who are promiscuous or even women in the past who used to wear bathing suits. For some reason this story reminded me of the Handmaid’s Tale because it kind of has similar connotations.

For example, the novel paints the future of the nation in a way that is brutal to read and where women are stripped of basically everything. However, reading the story behind the Yellow Wallpaper, it seems pretty similar. This made me kind of scared of our past and how even now in the present we can read a story like the Handmaids Tale or the Yellow Wallpaper and be afraid if that will be our future, yet it was our past. I wonder if we will ever learn from our mistakes as a nation and not make this still be a thing that is written about, but that is too hard to tell.

I had previously read the Yellow Wallpaper, but I remember not understanding the events that were taking place. Taking a second look at this short story, and after our lessons on both storytelling and history, this story makes more sense than it did previously. It was written in the late 1800s, which was a time in which women had little to no autonomy in their homes, and were treated like property by their husbands. This context is relevant to the story, because the narrator struggling with mental illness in a time in which women had very few rights and conversations about mental illness were taboo. Although I was not certain of what the symbolism was for the woman in the wallpaper, I interpreted it as the narrator’s representation of herself, trapped in both her room and her mind, unable to escape. She becomes increasingly disturbed throughout the story because she is helpless without adequate treatment for her mental illness and a husband/doctor who thinks she is making this up. Today, the conversation about mental illness has shifted so that it has become more mainstream and has been legitimized.The narrator is faced with the struggle of being not believed by her doctor, who also happens to be her husband. There are multiple levels to this, because she is both not believed by her husband because of the fact that she is a woman and women were of much lower social status than men, so their feelings were not legitimized. I did some research to gain more context, and found that the Yellow Wallpaper was relevant in helping people gain a better understanding of postpartum depression, what the woman in the story appears to be suffering from, which is a very common phenomenon today but was not discussed or understood well in the 1800s.

I had this reading for LDST 101, but seeing it for the second time read a little bit differently, especially because I already knew generally what it was about, which allowed me to pin point a few quotes and ideas more easily. I knew that this was about how women tend to be silenced by men as the men use their positions of authority as validation. For example, John was a physician, and both the wife and John cite this as a reason for the wife to listen and obey John. Next, it was pretty obvious that the wife struggled with her mental health, and the reader got to follow this journey. On pages 5, the wife writes that it was a “great effort to think straight”, obviously showing her mental health struggle, but she is silenced by John. Furthermore, John even brings in the child as extra reason and weight to have the wife comply. John asks her to behave for “his and the child’s sake” using the child as leverage for getting the wife to comply.

With all of this struggle, we see the wife’s mental health really deteriorate as she begins to see the wallpaper move and take new shapes. When she says. “I am feeling ever so much better” on page 8, this is because her mind has been so significantly distorted by being stuck figuratively and literally by the restrictions her husband places on her. This story aims to discuss some stigma around mental health, and also touches on some gender inequality and restrictions in doing so.

One of the questions I am curious about is what low culture will become high culture.  As Dr. B said, many high culture was not viewed as high culture when they first came out. I wonder what specifics are needed to become high culture and if there are requirements that need to be met. Also who chooses what is considered low culture and high culture in our current society. How would our society look if some low culture was viewed as high culture in our current society?

Pop culture means that it is trendy for the current time. For time in this scenario, it is always changing meaning that there are always things coming out changing what the new pop culture would be. And the fact that with our current technology, we are able to have the same pop culture across different areas as the same information is shared and can have similar resources. Before there were many individuals that would receive information through others such as word of mouth. There used to be people who would get paid to deliver news to other towns and family members living in other areas when they could not deliver the news themselves.

Getting into the nitty gritty of what pop culture actually is in Doctor Bezio’s article was so interesting to me. As is said, pop culture is commonly viewed as juvenile, airheaded, and meaningless; a conflagration of what is popular with the young and or the dumb in the mainstream. When I hear pop culture, I immediately think of tik tok and other social medias and the newest pop music and reality television and the like. But the point about Shakespeare, and how he was lambasted for being vulgar in his time, actually took be aback. I mean, of course Shakespeare was considered pop culture in his days; it was what was popular within society… pop culture. What really hit it home for me was the discussion about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Once again, definitely pop culture, which sparked much discussion and social change and movement at the time of it’s publication. It lit a fire under many of it’s readers, and contributed to the social changes that predicated the Civil War. As Doctor B said, it is easy and wrong to dismiss pop culture (again, a meaningless and airheaded term) as “low brow” but really, it actually isn’t. When I think about pop culture, and at the very least moments in it I’ve been alive for, I realize that I have been around for some pretty impactful moments. The rise of amazing new artists, the release of incredible new technology, the rise of internet culture; all of these things are now accepted as normal. It is, as Doctor B says, a focal point at the center of civilization, but people are just so accustomed to it they don’t notice it.

This episode was by far my favorite of the series. Over the past several years we have seen more and more leadership in pop culture, especially in music. A lot of the time it is easy to disregard what an artist is singing or rapping about but when you take a closer look you can find all sorts of unimaginable deep meanings. One specific example I want to talk about is H.E.R.’s song I’m not okay. When you first listen to the song you hear the sad piano and breathtaking voice of H.E.R. singing about the anxiety and pain that comes with a relationship, specifically when worrying whether or not your significant other is drifting away or even worse, cheating on you. These are the exact same feelings I felt when I first listened to this song. Then I looked up the music video and my perception completely changed. The song came out in 2019 but in the wake of George Floyd’s death, H.E.R. released a music video for the song that featured dancing that depicted the emotions and actions of police brutality. In that instance, I looked up the words to the song and quickly saw the connection she was able to make to police brutality. While the song expresses all of the emotions discussed above, the song has an even bigger meaning. I’m Not Okay depicts the emotions of worrying about whether or not a loved one has been the subject of police brutality and if that same loved one is still alive. The song is so much more than it appears to be. The video features dancing that helps to perfectly describe the actions and emotions of police brutality. H.E.R.’s I’m Not Okay is just one instance of leadership within pop culture. Artists have taken an enormous leap in our lifetime in regards to creating emotional and impactful music about issues such as racism. I think that the continuous growth of leadership within pop culture is both impactful and necessary for the next generation. Artists are able to give voices to the voiceless. There is still work to be done in order to eradicate racism from the world, but seeing leadership grown not only in pop culture but also in places such as professional sports is extremely powerful.

Here is the music video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DYiZgahAk4